In June 2005, Orpah Winfrey was denied access to the Hermès company's flagship store in Paris, France. Winfrey arrived 15 minutes after the store's formal closing time, though the store was still very active and high end stores routinely extend hours for VIP customers. Winfrey believed she would have been allowed in the store if she were a white celebrity. "I know the difference between a store that is closed and a store that is closed to me," explained Winfrey. In September 2005, Hermès USA CEO Robert Chavez was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and sincerely apologized for a rude employee.

I've never been in France but they say the n-word thing is not a big deal there - it's more about social class than racism or anything else.

Wildly popular among white viewers, "The Cosby Show" helped fuel some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled "Cosby Knows Best," the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family -- headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) -- functioned as "an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: 'Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!'" "On 'The Cosby show,'" Miller noted, "it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in. And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified."

So America does care to give the impression it's not discriminating against n-word and the like?!

Wildly popular among white viewers, "The Cosby Show" helped fuel some of this sort of thinking during the Reagan era. As left culture critic Mark Crispin Miller noted in a 1986 essay titled "Cosby Knows Best," the affluent, hyper-consumerist, apolitical African-American Huxtable family -- headed by the affable, impish obstetrician Cliff (played by Dr. Cosby himself) -- functioned as "an ad, implicitly proclaiming the fairness of the American System: 'Look! [Cosby shows us] Even I can have all this!'" "On 'The Cosby show,'" Miller noted, "it appears as if blacks in general can have, and do have, what many whites enjoy and that such material equality need not entail a single break-in. And there are no hard feelings, none at all, now that the old injustices have been so easily rectified."

So America does care to give the impression it's not discriminating against n-word and the like?!

America doesn't f-ing care to give that impression! It's minority members like Oprah and the like that conform to the system and therefore get "promoted" to majority status!

I guess they're saying, hippo, that Orpah succeeded in a genre largely populated by whites, just like Eminem did the-inherently-black-music while being white.

It's true that Oprah and Eminem both glorify the system, but Eminem is peculiar in that he does that in a very "funny" way: he's so on your face when exposing the system for what it is in order to get people all riled up to buy his crap music.

It's funny to read rationalizations of critics that want to portray Eminem as attacking the system for real. Eminem is a creature of his environment. He is the authentic voice of the poor, white working class. White trailer trash. He is what American capitalism has made him. His angst is real, his anger legit -- though misdirected at women and gays because of malign social forces. Like Elvis. Or Bill Clinton. One critic called him "our" Johnny Rotten. But where the Sex Pistols attacked the Queen, Eminem bashes queens. One's political, the other's not. And that's all the difference in the world.

But then on top of this a second defense is layered: namely, that Eminem is a master satirist; that his lyrics-which some demented writer in "The London Guardian" declared as being the equal of, and in some ways superior to Robert Browning's -- are really an ironic expose of our own homophobia, mysogyny, class bias. He's our Swift, Twain, Ishmael Reed.

Then realizing there might be a potential conflict between defense A and defense B, a third one is proffered: namely, that the genius of Eminem is to be found in the "ambiguity" of his lyrics-which would, we guess, allow for him to be both "authentic" and "satirical". It's like there's an unreliable narrator at work, say the narrative voice in Henry James or Alain Robbe-Grillet.

"My little sister's birthday, she'll remember me For a gift I had ten of my boys take her virginity ("Mmm-mm-mmm!") And bitches know me as a horny-ass freak Their mother wasn't raped, I ate her female private part while she was 'sleep Pissy-drunk, throwin' up in the urinal ("You @ # ! * i n' homo!") That's what I said at my dad's funeral"

From the song "Amityville"

All these defenses are undermined by what Eminem himself has to say about what he's doing -- which is that the lyrics are a "gimmick", that "they don't mean what they say", and "aren't worth a grain of salt". In other words, it's all a put on, not for some satirical purpose, but merely because he and his label know that these kinds of exploitative lyrics appeal to pre-teens who share many of the same phobias/fantasies. In other words, it's not about making music, expressing the condition of the alienated working class in Detroit, but about making money. Eminem said this precisely in his attack on Napster. He's marketing hate to kids for money. It's that simple and not that different in kind from tobacco advertising -- which could be defended on artistic and First amendment grounds as well, and indeed has been by the tobacco industry's hired guns.

Eminem's lyrics are a kind of premeditated infantilism, but not a healthy regression toward the polymorphous perverse, but a summons to the thanatic impulse, a call for division, repression, an invocation of the very forces that have divided the working class for decades. He serves the interests of the State. The idea that Eminem might be "censored" is a ruse, and a tired one, and an insult to those who have truly been censored. Cross the powerful, question the System and you risk censorship, lawsuits, SLAPP suits, beatings, harassment or worse. As long as Eminem remains a whore for the corporations, he will continue to accumulate wealth and be shielded from the censors of the state. And he is a corporate mercenary, whether it's flacking for Nike or for the music industy's trade association, the Recording Industry Association of America.

Let him rap by all means. To our minds, he's a hired gun from the poor part of town who preys on the powerless, extorts money from the poor, and celebrates a thuggish brand of gangster capitalism. His defenders and apologists in the critical world are just another arm of the very same industry. The more instructive analogy with Eminem would have been with Browning's original idol, Percy Shelley -- the most irascible English poet since Kit Marlowe. Shelley was an adulterer, an atheist, an abortionist, drove his first wife to suicide, a victim of censorship who was driven from England, and in turmoil with his own homosexual longings. The all-round infant terrible of English poetry, who had the honor of being savaged by the crypto-fascist Matthew Arnold. Forget Shelley's ability with the language and look only at the sensibility of the two. Both have blood lust. But Shelley longs to see the powerful pay, the deposition of tyrants; he was an unrepentant Jacobin. Eminem is the neighborhood bully, preying on the weak, the defenseless, the marginalized, singing the virtues of accumulation and consumption, never once taking on the powerful-a would-be tyrant, himself.

It's one thing to defend Eminem against censorship -- quite another to promote, as Chaucer would say, "the sentence" or message of his lyrics. Remember the lines by Shelley, dashed off in a hour of rage following the Peterloo Massacre -- the WTO protest of its day, where 40,000 protesters and laborers were trampled by English police on horseback. Try to find any similar sentiments in Eminem. Here are two stanzas:

I generally don't pay much attention to rich white boys rapping hip hop unless they have some talent like the Beastie Boys. Never understood the popularity of Eminem, but I can say after watching his latest anti-Bush video that the guy's career has definitely jumped the shark. If you haven't seen the video, it's basically an animated anti-Bush song full of feisty imagery. Just when you think that the video is going somewhere with a soldier doffing their uniforms and putting on black bloc hip hop gear, the video ends with one of the most intentionally hilarious bad endings ever filmed. We're talking the end of "Return of the Jedi" here, but instead of brave rebels dancing with muppets we have a revolution that crashes and burns at the voter registration table. Instead of the angry peeps burning down the institutions of imperial America, they obediently get into line to register their disempowerment via the voter registration form.

Decontructing this video, you have to wonder if Eminem secretly despises his fans. He urges them to get behind him in this army of disgruntled hip-hoppers who wear identical gear from Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters. They obediently line up to register to vote and will presumably queue up in the sequel to buy more of Eminem’s liberal hip hop crap. I would love to be a fly on the wall of a room filled with former Black Panthers who are watching this video. I can imagine the hilarity that would ensue in the room as true revolutionaries reacted to the liberal sell-out message of this talentless rapper. I can also see the sparkle in the eyes of the Chumbawamba troupe, as they exchange knowing glances, right before bursting out in song: "turning revolution into money."

It's a total shame that Eminem has offered up this hilarious display of revolutionary premature ejaculation. The video is fine in terms of criticizing Bush, but it fails to criticize the Democrats, who are equally culpable in the war and the other ills depicted in the video. The urging for people to vote at the end is just a sorry example of liberal capitalism trying to exploit revolution and popular anger for a few more bucks.

Are fame and fortune dreams come true? According to Eminem, they're more of a nightmare.

Born Marshall Mathers III and alternately known as Slim Shady, the guy from Detroit came from out of nowhere, skyrocketed to hip-hop stardom in less than two years, and is now a household name, unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. With four-million copies sold in five weeks (ten-million to date), Eminem's latest release The Marshall Mathers LP scored the best-selling solo debut week in pop history. The CD won countless awards, accolades, and, an avalanche of criticism, for its implications of violence and prejudice. The unrestrained rapper has become a steady guest on every rock radio station's playlist and every publication's headlines. Each for very different reasons. Eminem has kept the news desks full with his controversial lyrics, arrests, weapons charges, lawsuits, marital disputes, and, believe it or not, four Grammy nominations – complete with corresponding backlash from critics and activist groups alike.